Cheap Airline Tickets Flights – Get your tickets at dirt-cheap prices.
There are now long-haul airlines within the US which offer the same advantage of cheap tickets and flights on convenient schedules. An innovator in this space has been JetBlue, which started with relatively long-haul flights from its hub at JFK in New York City. Cheap tickets are the watchword for more and more leisure travelers. “We compete with the bus," said the founder of Southwest Airlines, Herb Kelleher. He realized that his competition in the 1970’s was not the other airlines, but rather other modes of transport, which, up to that time, were a good deal less expensive (if less convenient) than the plane.
Tickets for flights to well-traveled city pairs, such as Dallas to Houston, Houston to San Antonio, and San Antonio to Dallas, were the first to come under the cheap ticket ‘gun’ in the 1970’s. Southwest pioneered the 50-minute route from Dallas to Houston for $26, which was an unheard-of fare at the time. The two main competitors on that route, Braniff Airlines (now extinct) and American Airlines, fought back by matching the fares and crowing about their better service.
Braniff went as far as to cut the fare offered by Southwest in half again—that is, only $13 for each flight from Dallas to Houston. Rather than match the price, Southwest’s Kelleher decided to keep it at $26 and give each traveler a bottle of Chivas Regal scotch. Needless to say, most of the Texan travelers chose the scotch, and Braniff was forced to back out of the route. Cheap airline flights need not lack the luxury found in legacy airlines. In some cases today, the opposite is true. The legacy airlines are charging for their meals and drinks and movies, while the low-cost airlines are offering some food (not meals, but good peanuts, cookies and potato chips) for free, free headphones and, in the case of JetBlue, free TV and movies for every passenger. It’s tough for the Majors to compete with the service offered by the new low-cost airlines.